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Networks for school improvement

The Networks for School Improvement (NSI) portfolio supports organizations that bring groups of middle and high schools together to advance high school graduation and college success rates for their Black and Latino students and students experiencing poverty. These organizations serve as intermediaries for the school networks they bring together, each of which decides its own approach. Successful networks share three hallmarks: unwavering commitment to equity, dedication to continuous improvement, and use of indicators proven to predict students’ learning, progress, and success.

Networks for School Improvement Year 2 Update

Learn more about our NSI work from this recent webinar, where we hosted a conversation about early lessons learned, best practice in continuous improvement, and key highlights from networks and intermediary organizations supporting schools.

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Educators who know their students and settings best are supported and empowered to work together to unlock innovations and solutions. This support helps them improve outcomes for Black and Latino students and students experiencing poverty, create assets for sharing their work, and build long-term improvement capacity in and across their schools and school systems.
We invested in this approach because we’ve learned the best answers don’t come from a one-size-fits-all approach, but instead from empowering local school leaders and educators to identify solutions that best meet their particular needs. The NSI portfolio is anchored in the idea that if intermediary organizations use equity and data-driven continuous improvement methods to introduce solutions and tools to schools and school systems, then those schools and systems can improve key outcomes predictive of college readiness and postsecondary persistence for Black and Latino students and students experiencing poverty. This builds on a demonstrated interest among educators to connect and work together using evidence-based practices and a student-centered approach. This work is particularly focused on key transition points: eight and ninth grade and college-ready on-track indicators or completing key steps in the college application and enrollment process.
Each individual network works toward the goal of supporting school teams in adapting their work and solving problems together to improve outcomes for Black and Latino students and students experiencing poverty. As a portfolio of investments, intermediaries are striving to build the field of effective schools, improve the availability and use of meaningful data that enables learning and improvement in schools, and develop school leadership capacity to engage in continuous improvement efforts that effectively drive change in schools.
With these investments, the learning and tools that come from these networks will be codified and shared with the field. High-quality support organizations will increase their capacity to lead the school improvement networks. We are learning from these organizations in order to develop and share a school support model that identifies the specific capacities an organization needs to lead equity-centered improvement networks. The broader field and key stakeholders can use the resulting resources in their own context to discover whether an NSI approach would work for them.

Focus Area Timeline

Initially launched in 2018, our NSI portfolio continues to grow to support groups of middle and high schools to work together to identify and solve common problems using approaches that best fit their needs, learning what works and refining their approaches as they go.

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Investment Priorities

Our grantmaking in our Networks for School Improvement portfolio is currently focused on the following priorities.

Building capacity of the current investments

Our priority is to support NSIs to meet the needs of their students and schools, as they work to improve on-track outcomes and build sustainable, networked continuous improvement capacities in their schools and systems. We do this through our NSI Community of Practice, which brings together networks to learn with and from each other.

Continuing to learn

We are dedicated to deep, rigorous learning and sharing about this work. We want to make sure schools are getting the support they need right now, and to learn under what conditions school-based teams successfully work together as a network to apply the tenets of continuous improvement to boost on-track student outcomes for students, how data systems can be reoriented to support rapid-cycle classroom and school level improvement, and what capacities intermediaries need to be successful.

Sharing resources and building the field

The NSI are developing a collection of powerful and useful resources, and we will support them to continue to generate tools and assets to share with the field. We are also deepening partnerships with organizations to develop resources for post-COVID-19 recovery work in schools, along with more equity-focused tools and other supports.

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